Open access journal

Open access (OA) is a mechanism by which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other barriers, and, in its most precise meaning, with the addition of an open license that removes most restrictions on use and reuse. Open access (OA) is a mechanism by which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other barriers, and, in its most precise meaning, with the addition of an open license that removes most restrictions on use and reuse. The main focus of the open access movement is 'peer reviewed research literature.' Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals. Conventional (non-open access) journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs. Various studies have investigated the extent of open access. A study published in 2010 showed that roughly 20% of the total number of peer-reviewed articles published in 2008 could be found openly accessible. Another study found that by 2010, 7.9% of all academic journals with impact factors were gold open access journals and showed a broad distribution of Gold Open Access journals throughout academic disciplines. A study of random journals from the citations indexes AHSCI, SCI and SSCI in 2013 came to the result that 88% of the journals were closed access and 12% were open access. In August 2013, a study done for the European Commission reported that 50% of a random sample of all articles published in 2011 as indexed by Scopus were freely accessible online by the end of 2012. A 2017 study by the Max Planck Society put the share of gold access articles in pure open access journals at around 13 percent of total research papers. In 2009, there were approximately 4,800 active open access journals, publishing around 190,000 articles. As of February 2019, over 12,500 open access journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) indexes the creation, location and growth of open access open access repositories and their contents. As of February 2019, over 4,500 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered in ROAR.